ZEIT ONLINE: Why did you decide to write a book about public assemblies right
now?

Judith Butler: I suppose I started to think about them during
the Arab Spring when some debates started on whether or not public
assemblies were a pure form of a democracy, suggesting:
"This is the people and they are throwing-off an unjust regime".
And of course that raises all sorts of questions, like: who are the
people really?
Is it important that they are showing up in the street, are the
bodies in the street representing all the people? What about those
who are not in the street?

ZEIT ONLINE: Why were you so interested in the role that the body plays in
assemblies?

Butler: There was also another debate related to the Occupy movement where
some people were saying "they don't have any demands, they are
just occupying space", so I was trying to say: "No, that is
a
way of making a demand, it is a way of saying this space belongs to
us or this space should be public". But it does not have to be
verbalised for that claim to be made; I thought they were making it
with their bodies or through the way their bodies were occupying
space. I wanted to make the case that bodily action or gesture is
also politically significant. It occupies the space to which it lays
claim, and so embodies the claim.

ZEIT ONLINE: One could read an implicit sympathy towards assemblies into your
book. Some people fear them.

Butler: Maybe it is the word assembly that we have to think about. There
could be mass gatherings, there could be mass movements, there could
be riots, there could be mobs. The mob is probably what we both fear.
That does
feel like violence could ensue. It is not a deliberate, it is not
politically minded. Assemblies are different. There people come
together and deliberate. And it is important that they come together,
that they appear for one another. I mean, for someone like Hannah
Arendt the assembly in Greece and in Rome was an important part of
the inception of democracy. And I think we continue to need
assemblies to realize democracies. We have to be able to distinguish
between assemblies that are self-reflective and are inclusive –
seeking to exemplify modes of democratic participation and debate, –
and those who are giving up on democracy.

ZEIT ONLINE: You write that assemblies allow people to enter the public space who
are usually excluded from it. Is that true in the case of Pegida?

Butler: There are principles of radical democracy at stake in the kind of
assemblies that I support. If a group of right-wing racists get
together and say that they have been excluded from a public space
that does not accommodate racists, then they are actually asking for
a right to exclude others. They are trying to assemble and achieve
public space for the expressed purpose of a racist and exclusionary
project. That is hardly democratic in intent or in effect.

ZEIT ONLINE: How do we decide which assemblies "we need"? An assembly might be
inclusive and exclusive at the same time. Over the years in Tahrir
Square in Cairo, countless women suffered sexual assault.

Judith Butler

born in 1956, is a US-American philosopher and philologist. She teaches critical theory and comparative literature in Berkeley, California. Butler became widely known as a gender theorist in 1990, after the publication of her book: "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity". In 2016 she was awarded the Theodor-W.-Adorno- Award in Frankfurt. In October 2016 the German translation of her new book "Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly" was released by the German publishing house Suhrkamp.

Butler: I think assemblies pose different kinds of risks for different kinds
of people. If you are a woman or trans or if you are a migrant, you
are probably at risk in a public assembly because public assemblies
do involve physical and public exposure. You don't always know who
you are next to, you don't always know who will exploit that
proximity for the purposes of injuring you or someone close to you or
someone on the other side of the crowd. So there is always a risk in
public assembly.

ZEIT ONLINE: Would you like to see more bodies on the streets?

Butler: No. I do not think that the more bodies there are on the street the
better our lives become. By the way, I don't think you can separate
what the bodies are doing from language. Bodies are expressive –
they signify.

ZEIT ONLINE: Can one differentiate what a Pegida expresses through movement and
gesture, from what a democratically-minded assembly expresses?

Butler: I think you could. I don't think we can just decontextualize gesture
and movement. The question is how it is contextualized. Those are
generally racist and anti-migrant assemblies with a specific
politics. We have to understand what they are doing, and then judge
them accordingly. That is very different from new migrants taking to
the street and asking for inclusion. If you have been prohibited
from arriving in public because arriving in public is against the
law, then arriving in public is to take up a relation to that law.

ZEIT ONLINE: But that can be true of far-right populist demonstrations.

Butler: Yes, but we are also saying that state violence and state censorship
and racist popular movements all work against the claim to democracy
Those who lay claim to white privilege, for instance, may claim that
they are "excluded" by migrants, but they actually worry about
losing their privilege. That is the context and that has to be the
context by which we understand all of these gestures, movements and
verbal claims.

"There are principles of radical democracy at stake in the kind of assemblies that I support. If a group of right-wing racists get together and say that they have been excluded from a public space that does not accommodate racists, then they are actually asking for a right to exclude others. They are trying to assemble and achieve public space for the expressed purpose of a racist and exclusionary project. That is hardly democratic in intent or in effect."

Where does it say all manifestations of democracy lead to further democratization of the polity? The democratic process is a means to reach an end: a political decision. This decision can be anything (within the law).

Ms. Butler has every right to support whomever she likes. However, I find it problematic to deny the use of the word "democratic" to people whose political opinion she dislikes.

If one wants to fight racism, I think one should do that by democratic means and discursive actions. Not by excluding the racists from the process. Their ideas are as legitimate as mine - they are just bad.